


Sinner's Circle

by Hasty (UniformedServiceman)



Category: Zootopia (2016), Zootopia: Pack Street
Genre: Drinking, Gen, Rain, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-25
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-09-26 18:59:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9916511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniformedServiceman/pseuds/Hasty
Summary: We follow Avo on an exciting, but not untypical, evening, where she keeps everything under control. This is exactly the problem. Avo knows but doesn't understand. Betty sees it but doesn't know what it is. Pack Street is a place where nothing ever happens.





	

“Ciao,”

and she ended the call as she slid the phone into a pocket on her purse, feeling the grind of the quarters against their metal guides as she pushed the coin loader to its hilt. The rings fell though the guts of it, prompting a chime and the audible sound of the disengagement of the lock on the cycle selection panel. She pushed the button for “double load”. The water fell inside and slapped against the clothes, and the ill-assembled mixture began to throw itself to the curved walls until the sloshing drowned out the whirr of the electric motor.

Avo didn’t notice. The room reeked of dry heat and it burned her nose as it poured out of the driers. Everything but the faux-chrome fronts of the appliances had either browned or yellowed, washing over the interior in decay, like a flood had drowned it and left corpses. The book in her purse remained unread. The washing machines shook like they’d been challenged by the heater for supremacy; the lone bastard running was winning now, but it only had twenty minutes left to keep the throne. The laundromat was a twenty-four hour joint, but it was rare she had company here around this time Thursdays. She liked it that way.

Her phone went off, and she sent off a quick reply, hesitated, then laid the phone in her lap. She stared at the clashing angles of the line of washing machines, the north wall of detergent soaps, and the vintage 50’s tiled panel window, following each to their vertex, their target, skewing the room to make them match in her head. She imagined them shooting past their endpoints, rails of red light like bolts from a laser gun, holding trajectory, disappearing into the ground and sky.

Another text, this one from Betty:

“Teddy’s?”

Avo sent the reply almost without thought. “Sure.” The need for a qualifying statement hit Avo only after the first missive had carried itself across the invisible, and she tapped out something closer to the truth:

“I’m doing my laundry first. Be there at 10.”

It was her last load of the evening. Avo looked at what she was wearing, an old, faded T-shirt and slim jeans, and considered if she ought to change before her public appearance this evening or remain as she was. The washer made a guttural moan, cuing Avo, and she was at its door, basket paws at the ready, when its waterlogged bell struck and the door unlatched.  
  
\------------------

With a twist of her finger, she ensured that the door clicked behind her. The laundry slung over her shoulder had warmed her back at first, but as it cooled it only opened an avenue for the surprisingly chilly evening air to press against her. The floor lamp’d been left on. In this case it was quite useful, as the living room did not have a ceiling fixture and making it through the shadow without running into a piece of furniture would have required more luck than Avo wished to chance she had. She praised fortune, and, after negotiating her bedroom door, dumped the sack of fresh clothes on her bed.

Her room was immaculate, to her own surprise, as she hadn’t yet cleaned it that week. She’d find something to do in there, anyway. A small print of _The Magpie_ hung over the double bed, currently dressed for June with a turquoise-and-black checkered comforter that felt fragile and tight like a clotted wound, but kept her warm like nothing else. A little pine dresser held all her “utility” clothing with a little cramming, and she kept it opposite a thankfully sizeable sliding-door closet that kept the articles best left unfolded. The whitewashed walls dominated the room, challenged only by a very small walnut bookshelf that kept a single row of novels she’d only half-read. A boombox, hooked into external speakers, came to rest on the bottom shelf, flanked by CDs and tapes of a certain age, showing use but not wear. The whole place smelled slightly of cinnamon and myrrh, courtesy of a small incense container on the end-table next to an old flip-clock she’d had since she first started getting herself up for school.

It read 9:30. Too close for comfort, she decided, and she grabbed a windbreaker and went out the door still in her t-shirt and jeans before any small chores could distract her.

\-----

Teddy’s is a cheap joint for the nearly dead. It rots twelve blocks away from Avo’s apartment, close enough to walk while being far enough to make it seem better than it actually is due to the effort expended. On any given Thursday, it drew it a few hopeless bastards, a handful of sluts, and a desperate outcast itching for a fight. Today was more quiet than usual, and the silence of the bar was filled by the thud of the rain against the flat roof, drops joining a pool that bled out slow from a pipe on the north side. Avo could shut the dribbling out of her mind but couldn’t forget that she’d done it and couldn’t stop looking at herself in the mirror behind the bottles, so as she waited for Betty to show she tried to remember all the drinks she’d had in the past and figure out the one she wanted tonight.

After a few minutes, it came to her, and the mule barkeep, recognizing her epiphany, waltzed over and readied her hoof for the glass rack below the counter. Avo spoke without hesitation.

“Negroni, please.”

The barkeep’s lips curled to a smile. Samantha was an old hand here, despite being no older than twenty-four. Her eyes stared out from tunnels they’d made to keep themselves warm, resting on Avo’s expression as it shifted from a genuine polite smile to a sinister crease, veiling the points of the teeth. Along the heavily varnished bartop, she shoveled the ice, then layered the bitters, Avo now pausing to close her eyes and hear the liquid slosh together in the glass. Only after she’d heard the quiet clunk of the gin bottle falling into its position on the rail did Avo open them again.

She was disappointed. A spectacled goat had moved next to her, his double vision burrowing into himself, slightly clacking his teeth as he thought of something to say. She looked to him like she was lonely, ‘cause she leaned over the bar slightly, head staring down like she was muttering a prayer. He hadn’t been able to talk to anybody and say anything he’d meant all day. This was his chance to fix that. Avo saw the tremor of a confessional in him, and she grabbed the cocktail with one hand and her stool with another, finding weak spots, waiting for his first move.

“How are the Negronis here?” He worried it suggested he’d been listening in for some time, ring stalkerish, but he couldn’t think of anything else.

“Haven’t drank it yet.” Avo consciously imagined herself smiling. Fucked his game plan right over.

She let the drink warm in her hand until he felt compelled to say something, venture a guess, make himself vulnerable. The bar proper was only them and a wolf in a derby hat at the far right end who looked lost. Two lightbulbs ringed with black fabric shined down from the facing wall, landing like a spotlight dead-center on the bar, and throwing their shadows against the empty tables with force. A white, circle-fringed placemat laid crooked under the bartop, a fossil of a time when anyone’d eat here willingly.

“I haven’t seen anyone order one in a long time, is why I ask.”

Avo turned his head to face him, then stared in his eyes. “You look a little young to talk like that,”, hissing the vowels and snipping off the t’s like she’d been offended.

“I wasn’t trying to claim wisdom.” He was genuinely sorry.

Avo kept silent and let him dig the hole.

“…It’s that they were my mother’s favorite drink. Made them a lot at cocktail parties.”

Oh, delicious. “I remind you of your mother?”

Avo looked through her glass with a weary expression, then gently raised it to her lips, put it just above a horizontal angle, and let it pour down her throat. The goat knew he’d been mistaken. She was just fine alone. He felt his ribcage bear against his skin, tighten the nap of his hair against his stomach, heaving under a button-up that held in his self-esteem. He thought of the smile he wore in the pictures in his wallet, in the pictures stashed in government-issue plastic, and put his head up to rush on her.

The first move to declare confidence was to wholly change the topic. “The construction site on 25th is right next door to me, so I had to leave The Doornail behind for tonight.”

“Oh?” She barbed the end of the interjection, dropping her voice to betray the weakness of her sentiment.

“You know it’s going to be an upscale place when they’re done? I thought it was a strip mall or something, but they’re going to dress it up to try and get out of towners in there.”

The song that’d been playing ended in the middle of his sentence, and the rain came in to Avo’s mind again as she thought of the world outside.

He pushed his glasses in and pressed on. “It worries me. This neighborhood doesn’t have a lot of money.”

It worried Avo, too. She made sure it didn’t show.

“Rich folk won’t come here. You know why.” She let her smile peel back enough to bar her teeth for an instant, and tapped her glass against the bartop. Ignorance and an accusation of racism, both barrels, trying to get the motherfucker to piss off and leave her alone. She knew he thought he was smart, so a hint of hostile politics ought to make clear he should make tracks.

It didn’t quite. The goat didn’t speak to her any more, but held the line in his stool, sipping a well drink, wondering what the hell her problem was and what the hell his problem was.

It was another twenty minutes before Betty came waltzing in, a sweater tied around her waist, and staggered to the seat next to Avo’s, already drunk.

\--------------------------------------------------------

The larger wolf’s sweater hid Avo’s body underneath. She liked the slight scratch it made against her coat, the glimmer of the fake five-pointed stars that ran across the front, underlined by a number of horizon lines, heaven and earth the same white-speckled glimmer. The sleeves and torso stretched down to her thighs, then at its bottom curled in, and the rain pounding against her chest followed the path, slinking in lines and sousing her stomach until it slid past the curve and fell in pulses onto her feet.

They had left the instant the rain had died down some. It’d been a feint, and the pair sheered to the railroad bridge that lifted the commuter train over Short Street a block north of 12th. The whole space they stood in was about eight feet square; they shared it with a homeless lynx, asleep in a huddle of blankets, and a raccoon in a black slicker. Betty had pregamed hard enough that she didn’t have anything to drink for a full hour, waiting for more animals to come in. She should have been cut off the instant she walked in, but what little Teddy’s did included reliably refilling drinks until the patron in question could no longer speak.  There were no peak hours at Teddy’s. It held the door open to catch anybody, let them stay until they were ready to limp back under the sky. How many were in rose and fell on jagged currents that moved out of sight. The place filled out to around twenty pained faces all trying to shift out of first gear. None of them had made it when Avo noted the changing conditions, and both powered through their double gin and tonics to huddle three feet beneath a bright fluorescent light and sickly wood that kept the more successful above them.

The wind picked up, blowing some of the rain in from the other side. There was no telling how long they’d have to wait here. Avo pulled up her phone and began scrolling through posts with Betty to pass the time.

They hit a long spiel of a post, and Avo was swiping full steam ahead when Betty saw beside it a picture of its author. Her face lit up immediately, and she gave a childlike, sing-song whelp of excitement. “Hold it! That’s Arthur! ’sa card, I wanna hear what ‘s gotta say.”

Avo stared at the picture of a tiger with an odd zig-zag stripe pattern. She knew him very well.

“I’m drawing a blank.”

“Avo!” Betty was astonished. “Well, shit. Where d’ya start with somebody like Arthur…” Betty scratched her head and walked in place while she figured the root of him. “You remember when I worked at the Fast n’ Go along Breeze Avenue?”

“Part of it, yeah.”

Betty looked confused.

“That was when I first met you.”

“Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?” Betty didn’t think it was.

Avo didn’t elaborate.

“…anyway. Arthur was a regular customer, stopped in around 4 AM just before I switched out with Edgar. Always got two 24’s of different beers, high gravity brews.” She paused to cough and ready an imitation. “ _Mixing means percolation, which means more for your money, darling_!’”

“Oh, of course!” Betty had missed the key of Arthur’s voice -- the sibilance of the r’s – but the rest was remarkably close.

“He was that kinda, you know, “in control” guy. Thought he had it figured.”

“Social media came just in time for him.”

“It did! Now,” Betty chuckled, then assumed a comically formal air, “if you please…”

Arthur had penned a bona fide Jeremiad. Antagonistic retching about the manufactured propriety common to most social media accounts was by Arthur’s tongue melded with a case for honesty as a cardinal virtue, tumbling out to an emphatic affirmation of the need to be true to one’s self in every aspect of life. He wrote like he was talking in spite of himself, almost as a begrudging apology, or something so obvious that it was insulting to be forced to say it. While at times he became almost incomprehensible, there were numerous named accusations, with evidence, to keep it interesting. Now Sally was under the gun.

“Holy fuck! Didn’t he ask Sally out couple a years ago n’ get a no?”

Avo hid her enthusiasm. “Yeah! I was there when he asked her.”

“Guess’s his way of sayin’ goodbye.”

Avo parsed through the angry comment chain and saved a number of revealing photos of both parties. “Quite.”

Betty looked up into the rafters of the bridge. “How long’sit been since we seen Arthur?”

“…the block party before last, I think.”

“What d’you think?”

Avo didn’t really want to talk about it. “About what?”

“’Bout his thing, his speech.”

“I didn’t like it.”

Betty hissed. “It was fantastic!”

“And just what about it was so good?” Avo looked away in mock irritation.

Betty paused. “Couple times Arthur came in the store and asked me if this was what I wanted to do with myself. I’d tell him ‘no’, and he’d pay and leave. Remembered it ‘cause it was so out of character.”

“What does that have to do with his argument?”

“Wasn’t his words I liked. I just ‘aven’t thought about life like that in a long time. I am somebody I can stop being.”

Avo had meant to nod, so it’d pass, but words slipped out of her throat. “That’s rather much, Betty,” and realizing what she did, she froze, and stared dead ahead.

Betty didn’t hide her annoyance. “Already said Arthur’s, so let me ask you a di’rrent question. Do _you_ know what you’re doing?”

The air hung still for a minute or so. Avo tore her head from its blank gaze below the horizon to check a suspicion. The rain had stopped. Betty’d been crying.

“Jesus, Betty, you alright?” 

She nodded weakly. The raccoon and the lynx were gone.

“I’m sorry. Do you want to talk about it?”

“…said it’s alright.”

“Are you ~~\--~~ ”

“Avo,” Betty’s voice took on an unfamiliar, disgusted tone, “please listen to me. I’m fine.”

The clatter of the train suddenly jumped in volume as it went above then for the first time tonight, filing their foxhole with the building reverberation of the shaking cars grinding themselves to dust against the rails.

“I’m sorry.” Avo wanted to explain herself, but she knew Betty didn’t want to hear it.

Betty tapped her shoulder, and they walked away as the sound died.

\-----------------------------------------------------------

Avo laid on her bed, angry. She had six hours until work.

The ceiling had popcorn texturing under its white paint, and in the dim light of sunrise it sat like a minefield after the troops had come through. She felt cuts on her skin just looking at the jagged lines that spun off from their peaks, consequences of the discharge, and tried to figure out what exactly had gone off, carved her away, thrown her to her resting place.

She remembered an older photo of herself and Betty. It was at a party someplace. Avo wasn’t any older than twenty, and looked it. Betty had been murmuring something to her, something very serious, out of the corner of her muzzle, but it didn’t show, they both were staring right at the camera with perfect smiles on. She tried to find an out.

Her phone went off. It was a text from Al. This early?

“a sheep’s moving in next week.”

Unbelievable.


End file.
